The current state of the art is to provide an open loop servo controlled floppy disc drive using standard formatted floppy diskette media which is interchangable among drives. Such disc drives are generally characterized as low density or capacity in order to accommodate the mechanical positioning errors inherent in such open loop system and still be able to read and write data.
High capacity floppy disc drives as well as hard disc drives rely on developing high areal densities through increased track density (tracks per inch, TPI) and increased bit density (bits per inch, BPI). However both of these approaches to achieve a higher capacity floppy disc drive would require increased positioning accuracies which can only be achieved through a closed loop servo system. The error feedback required for such a closed loop servo system can be developed by prerecording or servo writing information on the magnetic disc media at a manufacturing facility. The net result of this procedure is that a servo writer must be developed and that the media requires costly and time consuming handling in order to be preformatted specifically to cater to the servo system of the disk drive.
Further such high density systems with closed loop servo mechanisms are generally incompatible with the aforementioned open loop servo controlled, low density disc drives using standard formatted media. Thus the high density floppy disc drives are not able to write to the standard formatted disc media.